Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (18 page)

The only reason Speke might have cooked up this story would have been to make his pledge-breaking visit to the RGS seem less dishonourable by exaggerating the length of time Burton had led him to believe he would be away from England. But since Burton actually expected Speke to go to the RGS
without him,
this idea falls to the ground. It is more likely that Burton was the liar, telling Speke he would return via Jerusalem, without having any intention of doing so. By pretending it would be many months before he would return to England, he could have hoped to lull Speke into imagining that he had plenty of time in hand, and need not hurry to the RGS the moment he landed. Then, if Burton caught the very next homeward-bound steamship, and Speke in the meantime had gone to the country to relax with his family, Burton might even arrive first at the RGS and grab command of the next expedition!

The obvious reason for doubting the truth of Speke’s Jerusalem claim was that he never published it in any book or article – and therefore never had to defend it in public. But letters are in existence, showing that Speke
wanted
to publish in 1864 and only held back because his paternalist publisher, John Blackwood, and his controlling mother put him under intense pressure not to append to his forthcoming book an eight-page coda, or ‘Tail’, containing the Jerusalem claim along with criticisms of Burton relating to both expeditions.
³⁸
But though at first Speke allowed the ‘Tail’ to be excluded, by the summer of 1864 he was agitating for it to go into the second edition of his
What Led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile.

Blackwood was not worried about Speke’s description of his parting from Burton in Aden (and what they did or did not say to one another), but he strongly advised against entering into any public argument with Burton over his failure to pay his porters properly. Details of Burton’s meanness to his African employees occupied half of the ‘Tail’s’ eight pages. Blackwood feared that by digging up this dispute, Speke would look vindictive. The other pages had mostly been devoted to Burton’s failure to grasp the immense importance of going north to Uganda before leaving Africa. Speke argued fiercely for publication of the ‘Tail’, but eventually his publisher managed to persuade him to exclude it from all copies, except from a few specially printed volumes to be presented to three or four members of Speke’s own family.
³⁹
But, by mid-August 1864, Speke had decided, whatever the consequences, to publish the ‘Tail’ in the next edition of
What Led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile
and instructed Blackwood’s chief manager, George Simpson, to include it in the second edition. He informed Simpson that ‘the ladies’ (his mother and his aunts) now agreed with him that ‘the best policy is to speak the truth and shame the Devil’ – aka Richard Francis Burton.
⁴⁰
At the same time, in an attempt to reassure Blackwood, Speke told him that he would be able to ‘prove all I have said’.
⁴¹
So Speke
had been
prepared to defend his claim about Jerusalem.

The only reason that the ‘Tail’ did not appear in a second (or any other) edition of
What Led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile
was that Speke died before a fresh printing could be undertaken. Then, after his death, his grieving mother and brothers were in no mood to publish anything likely to involve them in a public row with Burton about unpaid porters and his shortcomings as an explorer. So for almost 150 years the ‘Tail’ would continue to exist only between the covers of those three or four copies.
⁴²

Although the odds are heavily against Speke having made a pledge to his former leader, Burton’s cry of betrayal was also based on what he alleged was done in London in May and June 1859. ‘I reached London on May 21st,’ he would write, ‘and found that everything had been done for, or rather against me.’
⁴³
So what
had
been done?

SEVEN

A Blackguard Business

According to Burton, the day after Captain Speke returned to England:

He was induced to call at the rooms of the Royal Geographical Society and to set on foot a new exploration. Having understood that he was to await my arrival in London before appearing in public, I was too late with my own project.

Although this is a bizarre distortion of what actually happened, it is an account that would broadly speaking be accepted by historians.
¹

In reality, on 8 May 1859, the day Speke landed in England, he had booked a room at Hatchett’s Hotel, Piccadilly, and did not need to consider whether to contact the RGS since news of where he was staying had leaked out. Without his doing anything, a note arrived from Dr Norton Shaw inviting him to come to the monthly meeting of the RGS at Whitehall Place on the following day.
²
Speke wrote back agreeing to attend ‘tomorrow’s discourse’. Knowing that discussion would centre on the Nyanza, he wrote with greater caution than he had yet shown: ‘I believe most firmly that the Nyanza is one source of the Nile, if not the principal one.’
³
Shaw knew from Speke’s earlier letters that he, rather than the less resilient Burton, had been responsible for making all the expedition’s scientific observations and maps and had independently visited the Nyanza. For this reason, he seems to have decided that Speke’s arrival ahead of Burton presented the RGS with an opportunity that should be grasped. He therefore took Speke to the Belgravia house of the secretary designate of the RGS, Clements Markham – a former naval officer, traveller and occasional journalist – so the three of them could discuss, in confidence, what should be done. The upshot, in Markham’s
words, was that: ‘We talked the whole matter over for some time, and the next day I went with him [Speke] to Sir Roderick … [who] at once took him up.’
⁴
Speke may just possibly have manipulated Shaw and Markham into engineering a meeting with Sir Roderick Murchison, the President of the RGS, but it seems far more likely that the two RGS officials decided for themselves that Speke ought to meet Sir Roderick as soon as possible.

Sir Roderick Murchison.

In any case, on the 9th, Speke met Murchison, showed him his map of the Nyanza, and told him that the Kivira river fed the White Nile. ‘Sir Roderick, I need only say, at once accepted my views,’ wrote Speke, adding joyfully that the RGS President’s parting words had been: ‘Speke, we must send you out there again.’
⁵

Burton arrived at Southampton docks on 20 May, and later complained that on arrival he found that ‘everything had been done for, or rather against me. My companion stood forth in his true colours as an angry rival.’
⁶
But
was
Speke angry, and had ‘everything been done against’ Burton? On 19 May – soon after learning that Burton’s arrival at Southampton was imminent -Norton Shaw asked Speke to prepare a paper for the regular meeting at the RGS on the 23rd. Speke replied in a courteous, rather than an angry spirit:

If a geographical paper is required to illustrate my map, I shall be very happy indeed to write one. At the same time, I think it would be unfair to Captain Burton, commandant of the expedition, if I touched upon anything not entirely relating to that branch – especially as I know that Burton has been very industrious in observing &obtaining great masses of matter appertaining to the manners, customs, &productive resources of all the country traversed by the expedition.
⁷

Undoubtedly Speke wanted an expedition of his own, but this was hardly surprising given that Burton had been ill for three-quarters of the time and had made it impossible for him to explore Lake Tanganyika and the northern Nyanza with any thoroughness. Burton later argued that Speke had only resolved to go back to Africa without him because Laurence Oliphant – a talented young travel writer, reviewer and RGS committee member – had poisoned Speke’s mind during a week when chance had flung them together on board HMS
Furious,
then steaming from Aden to Suez.
⁸
Of course Speke had not needed Oliphant to alert him to his incompatibility with Burton and his need to be master of his own destiny in future. In fact, after leaving Kazeh, Speke had written to his brother Edward, suggesting that he should come to Uganda with him.
⁹

But regardless of what Speke wanted for himself, there is no firm evidence that by the time Burton reached London on 21 May the RGS’s grandees had already come to a clandestine decision to send Speke to Africa without his old companion, as Burton would soon allege. Certainly, by late May Speke had met Sir Roderick Murchison, who had said he wanted to
send him back to Africa at the head of his own expedition. Yet decisions of this kind were not made by the President, despite his considerable influence, but by the Expeditions’ Sub-Committee. Indeed, a month after Burton had returned both he and Speke were summoned to appear before this very committee to argue in favour of their recently submitted written proposals for separate African expeditions. No doubt, Laurence Oliphant, who was a member of this three-man committee, had told his colleagues that while he and Speke had been on board HMS
Furious,
the young explorer had told him about his dislike of his former leader, and that this made it essential to invite him and Burton to submit
different
East African proposals so the committee could judge which most deserved their support.

Burton wrote: ‘I was too late with my own project. This was to enter Africa via the Somali country, or by landing at the Arab town of Mombas
[sic],
whence the south-eastern watershed of the Nilotic basin might be easily determined.’
¹⁰
In reality, ‘lateness’ had nothing to do with the subsequent rejection of his proposed itinerary. Three years earlier he himself had declared travelling inland from Mombasa to be too dangerous, and his hairbreadth escape in Somaliland made this alternative route just as unwelcome to the RGS. Inevitably, Burton’s shocking physical condition could only have been a disincentive to send him on another, very likely fatal, African journey. His future wife, Isabel, described him on his return as ‘partially blind … a mere skeleton, with brown yellow skin hanging in bags, his eyes protruding and his lips drawn away from his teeth’. A short walk in the Botanical Gardens usually ended, she said, with him being taken away ‘almost fainting in a cab’.
¹¹

Speke, on the other hand, was in robust health, and his proposal that he should return to the Nyanza by the route he had already pioneered, and then march along the lake’s western shore to Uganda and the Kivira river, struck the committee as much more realistic. Yet, despite the fact that Burton’s plans were wholly impractical, his claim that he had been prevented by Speke’s treachery from embarking on a viable mission would be
repeated in three of his books, in his wife’s biography, and then by most of his biographers. The cumulative power of this oft repeated cry of betrayal can hardly be understated. Even Speke’s solitary biographer has repeated it.
¹²
It has proved irresistible to follow the line of the acerbic geographer and eugenicist, Francis Galton, and see Speke as ‘the conventional, solid Briton’ being preferred to Burton by unimaginative Establishment figures like Murchison, who would have been sure to mistrust ‘Ruffian Dick’ as ‘a man of eccentric genius and tastes, orientalised in character and thoroughly Bohemian’. In fact they would have backed Burton to the hilt if they had thought him likely to be a winner in Africa. But when Burton faced Laurence Oliphant and his more venerable colleagues across the well-polished committee table in Whitehall Place, he had been so ill and so unconvincing in his arguments that he had not even been able to offer an approximate starting date for his journey. His most recent and clear-sighted biographer has fairly described his proposal as ‘the last despairing throw of the dice by a gambler, who knows that his luck has run out’.
¹³

Two days after this uncomfortable encounter, Burton experienced another. As leader of the expedition he was awarded the Founder’s Medal of the RGS in front of a large and well-dressed audience of gentlemanly geographers and travellers. A happy event, one might have thought, but because Sir Roderick Murchison spent most of his talk before the presentation praising Captain Speke rather than Captain Burton, his audience was left with the strong impression that although Burton was entitled to the medal as leader of the expedition, Speke had actually done all the work. ‘A marked feature of the expedition is the journey of Captain Speke from Unyanyembe to the vast inland lake called Nyanza,’ remarked Murchison, not long before drawing Burton’s attention to ‘the very important part which your colleague, Captain Speke, has played in the course of the African expedition headed by yourself’. The silver-haired geographer had earlier talked about the great value of Speke’s observations for latitude and longitude. These unwelcome reminders of his
indebtedness to his ‘subordinate’ compelled Burton to pay him a tribute of his own. He would never do so again.